1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus and program for use in an automatic layout system, and to a layout processing method.
2. Description of the Related Art
One-to-One Marketing is a kind of a database marketing technique to make a database of individual attribute information, such as age, gender, hobby, preference, and purchase history, to analyze the information, and to make proposals that meet the needs of customers. A variable printing technique is a typical marketing technique of this type. Along with recent progress in DTP (Desktop Publishing) technology and recent wide use of digital printers, variable print systems have been developed, which customize documents for each customer and output the customized documents. The variable print systems are required to optimally lay out and display contents that vary in amount of information with customers.
A variable print system has been achieved by disposing containers on a document to thereby create a layout, and also associating the containers with a database. Incidentally, the container is defined to be a partial region (or a data area) on which contents (to be drawn) are drawn. That is, a customized document (a document) is created by performing operations of laying out such containers on a document and associating a layout with a database (that is, associating each of the contents of the database with each container). In the present specification, such a document is referred to as a variable data document.
However, the size of each container serving as a partial region, to which texts and images are pasted, is fixed. Thus, in a case where an amount of data contained in the database is larger than the size of a container when this data is inserted into the container, text overlap or image clipping occurs. Conversely, in a case where the amount of the data is smaller than the size of the container, a blank space is formed in the container.
If the contents are image data, it is possible to reduce an image, which is represented by the image data, in size and to draw the reduced-size image in a container. However, this may have a harmful effect in that the reduced-size image is extremely small. Also, a technique of reducing, in a case where text data having a size larger than a fixed size of a container is inserted thereinto, the font size of a text to display the entire text in the container has been proposed. However, in a case where the font size is adjusted in this manner, the font size becomes too small to thereby cause problems that the balance of the whole document is disrupted, and that the document is difficult to read.
Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 7-129658 discloses a technique of reducing, as the size of a text region increases, the size of an adjacent region to maintain the distance between the text region and the adjacent region as an automatic layout technique to solve these problems.
Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 7-129658 describes that as the text is input, the text region is enlarged. However, in a case where the size of the text region increases, the size of the adjacent region is reduced to maintain the distance therebetween. Thus, the technique described in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 7-129658 has a problem in that as an amount of texts to be input increases, the adjacent region is kept reduced. Additionally, the technique described in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 7-129658 takes no consideration about a variable print system adapted to create a document customized for each customer by associating each layout frame with a database and then inserting content data into a container.
An example of a related layout method of giving consideration about variable-data printing is a method of creating a container having a fixed size and then inserting content data thereinto. However, in the case of using a container having a fixed size, this layout method has a problem that when content data, whose size is larger than that of the container, is inserted thereinto, an overflow occurs, and that when such content data is forcibly inserted thereinto by reducing a font size, the font size becomes extremely small. Also, it is contrived to increase or decrease the size of the container according to the size of the content data. However, in a state in which a plurality of containers is associated with one another, when the size of one of the plurality of containers is increased, the sizes of the associated containers have to decrease with an increase in the size of the one of the plurality of containers. Thus, layout processing cannot be performed in consideration of the balance among the sizes of the containers.
Consequently, a related layout processing method of performing, in a case where the size of each container is changed according to the size of content data inserted thereinto, layout processing by controlling an amount in change of the size of each container is employed as a related layout method taking into consideration the balance among the sizes of a plurality of containers associated with one another. Thus, layout processing can be performed in consideration of the balance among the sizes of the associated containers.
An object of the aforementioned one-to-one marketing is to create a catalog or a pamphlet according to customers' needs. In such a case, it is assumed to create different pamphlets or catalogs respectively corresponding to customers. Thus, it is highly likely that an optimum layout for a user cannot be created by using only a layout adjustment algorithm adapted to adjust an amount of change in the container size according to the size of the aforementioned content data.
It is now assumed that there are, for example, two flexible containers A and B, and that content data are inserted from a database into both of the containers A and B. In a case where both of the data respectively inserted into the containers A and B are large, and where the containers are enlarged according to the size of the content data, the containers are not fitted into a page. Thus, it is considered to adjust the sizes of the data, which are to be respectively inserted into the containers A and B, by equally reducing the sizes of such data so that the containers are fitted into a page.
When this technique is used, the following problems occur. First, it is assumed that a document to be created includes a container set by a creator to appeal more to users than other containers. In a case where the aforementioned layout processing adapted to adjust an amount of change in each container size is performed, the layout processing taking the balance between the containers A and B into consideration can be performed. However, no layout reflecting a creator's intention can be created. Consequently, the creator should edit a container, which is to be set by the creator to appeal to users, again after checking a result of the aforementioned layout processing.
To solve this problem, a technique of setting a layout priority on a container has been considered. This technique can raise or lower the priority of the container by setting a weight (or priority) on a change in the size of the container. For example, a high weight is set on a container to be laid out to have a size that is close as much as possible to the size of the content data to be inserted into the container. Conversely, a low weight is set on a container whose size doesn't need to be much close to the size of such content data. This enables layout calculation to reflect a user's intention. However, according to this technique, a priority should preliminarily be set on a container. Therefore, it is necessary to preliminarily know what is represented by the content data included in each record. Also, the priority cannot be changed by using information on content data to be actually inserted into a container.